No, BBC, Disaster Losses Can’t Be Tied to Climate Change
1 day ago Anthony Watts
The recent British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Science Focus publication “The US is now paying more than any other country for climate change damage, study suggests,” claims that the United States is “now paying more than any other country for climate change damage,” citing a study estimating $16.2 trillion in U.S. losses since 1990. This is a fabricated falsehood. Decades of peer-reviewed research on disaster losses show no detectable long-term trend in normalized weather-related losses attributable to human-caused climate change and the BBC is wrongly conflating weather with climate.
The BBC based its story on a study from researchers at Stanford University, who write “[c]limate change is causing measurable harm globally.” They admit that no research links loss and damages from extreme weather to climate change; a gap in knowledge they attempt to remedy by applying politically motivated, flawed social cost of carbon estimates to econometric models tying carbon dioxide emissions to aggregate economic output in simulations of what output might have been had the Earth not warmed slightly.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/04/11/no-bbc-disaster-losses-cant-be-tied-to-climate-change/